Author Archives: Jay

Sundance 2021 Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street

Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street is an easy documentary to love. Not many among us grew up without Sesame Street. The thought is inconceivable. Sesame Street IS childhood. It was a mainstay in our home thanks to my mother’s exuberant rate of reproduction; there was always a toddler falling in love with it for the first time. Although I haven’t seen an episode in years (decades more likely), I could still recognize not just characters but recurring sketches, animations, and songs. This stuff really soaked into my brain, and that’s exactly what it was born to do.

Aimed at preschoolers, specifically those from underprivileged and inner city backgrounds, it was an educational program built with a curriculum to teach to, guided by princes of early childhood development. The people behind the show realized that kids were spending up to 8 hours a day in front of the television set, and wanted to seize the opportunity to give them a leg up when it came to the fundamentals, like abcs and 123s.

Director Marilyn Agrelo interviews from an impressive breadth of sources, including camera operators, actors, puppeteers, writers, songwriters, and more. Jim Henson and director Jon Stone are consulted repeatedly through archival footage, and it’s a pleasure to hear from them both. It’s also quite fascinating to see the joy and the intention with which this show was conceived and created. Of course, the best part is, unsurprisingly, the Muppets themselves. It’s exciting to revisit childhood friends, but it’s also a delight to see Big Bird’s first design, to hear Bert and Ernie address the nature of their very special relationship, to learn how Count got his name, to discover why Oscar was always so very hard to please, and why Kermit felt it was so difficult being green. The show fearlessly took on Big Topics like race, death, and inequality, but they did it with such joy in their hearts and with the very best interests of children in mind that Sesame Street transcended mere television. It has an intangible quality that this documentary does its best to describe.

Sundance 2021: John And The Hole

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Imagine waking up in the bottom of a hole – you, your spouse, your kid. You’ve been drugged, and now you’re being held hostage. There’s no way out. Worse, your son is missing. What happened to him? Is he hurt? Worse? Who’s doing this, and why?

Imagine waking up in the bottom of a hole and realizing it was your teenage son who put you there.

Imagine finding a hole and thinking: I should put my family in there.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is the kid who found a hole, drugged his family, dragged their bodies out to the hole and tossed them in. And then he walked away.

It’s like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for kids who make their own luck. With the run of the house, John gets to play video games, drink juice from the container, and keep up with his piano practice. It’s actually a lot like his old life, which was pretty privileged, but with more driving, and more cash, though he has little need for either. Sean called it a staycation and indeed John does seem to be adapting well to his new circumstances.

Meanwhile, in the hole, mom Anna (Jennifer Ehle), dad Brad (Michael C. Hall), and sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) are having a much less fun time. Hungry, dirty, cold, and weary, they’re coming to terms with the act that not only is it their very own John doing this to them, he may very well intend for them to die.

Before we’d seen the end of the film, we discussed a hypothetical – say the family eventually escapes the hole. What then? Do they call the cops on their son? Have him arrested? They’d already been held against their will for days at this point, but the parent-child attachment can be incredibly strong. What would you do?

John himself is starting to wonder what his endgame is and to be honest, I’m wondering whether the writer even knows. Director Pascual Sisto’s style is sleek and carefully calibrated, but the film is just too shrouded in ambiguity to have a lasting impact. The premise had so much potential, much like its pro(?)tagonist John, a young man figuring out who he is in the world, eager to try on adulthood like a jacket but not quite sure what to do with it once it’s on.

Imagine making a movie about a boy who puts his family in a hole, only to realize you don’t have much to say about it.

Sundance 2021: In The Earth

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During quarantine, plenty of us baked bread, some of us picked up diamond painting, a few overdid it on video games, and the fertile imagination of writer-director Ben Wheatley looked around and thought “I can make a horror movie out of this.” Because OF COURSE he can.

As a deadly virus ravages the world, Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) sets off toward Olivia Wendell’s research camp deep in the woods, accompanied by park scout guide Alma (Ellora Torchia). Local lore warns of a mystical being who haunts the forest but the attack on their first night seems a little more pedestrian in nature; they suffer bruises and are left shoeless and confused, but are otherwise fine. Still, they are glad to run into Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a man living off-grid under the leafy protection of the woods. He tends to their wounds and feeds them some dinner and the pair might have gone off the next morning, if the forest didn’t have other ideas. Clearly two grown adults should have been a little more leery of a shady man living alone in the woods, especially after a violent attack, but this is a horror movie, so Martin and Alma make bad, befuddling choices. Granted, even the lead scientist Olivia (Hayley Squires) isn’t what she seems, and between these two wilderness nutjobs, Martin and Alma are in for a very bad time. And that’s saying nothing of the malignant forces of the forest itself, which seem to prevent them from leaving.

Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth is deeply disorienting and unnerving. An ominous score by Clint Manswell mixes synth dread with sounds made by actual leaves and plants found in the arboreal woods outside of London where they filmed. We likely all felt the call of nature during lockdown, and Wheatley’s beautiful visuals are dizzying, especially paired with hallucinogenic kaleidoscopes of lights and colour, and stultifying bursts of noise.

A sense of unease and danger permeates the woods, and we’re kept further off-kilter wondering if the main antagonists are indeed the human ones, or if the intangible forces are perhaps the more worrisome. A cross between Annihilation and The Blair Witch Project, with mystical allusions, ritualistic sacrifice, and necromancy: these dark woods have it all, and Wheatley’s stripped down approach is perfectly spooky and provoking. As alarm mounts, Nick Gillespie’s cinematography gets shakier as he morphs into handheld mode, the camera’s precursor to fight or flight. The imagery becomes more opaque, the woods even more forbidding, and when the end comes, its implications will trouble and disturb you.

Sundance 2021: Cryptozoo

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Film festivals like Sundance draw top tier directors and the finest actors, but they’re also a great space for branching out of your comfort zone and trying something different. Cryptozoo is going to be so different, apparently, that the programmer compliments us on our “adventurous taste” before we’ve even seen the film.

Writer-director Dash Shaw impressed Matt at the Toronto International Film Festival back in 2016 with his entry, My Entire High School Is Sinking Into The Sea. This year I’m just grateful he’s given us a shorter title to remember.

Cryptozoo is a strange beast, which is funny considering it’s literally about mythical hybrid creatures whose existence is disputed or unsubstantiated. Lauren (voiced by Lake Bell) doesn’t just believe in them, she collects them, having dedicated her life to rescuing them and sheltering them in a zoo she hopes will challenge public perception and move the dial toward acceptance once it’s open. For years she’s been pursing a Baku, a dream-eating creature that looks like a cross between a baby elephant and the neon-painted spirit animals from Coco. Of course, lots of Lauren’s work is battling the other factions who would also like to get their hands on these creatures, for exploitation or worse.

Hand drawn (translation: wonky boobs) and distinctively animated, Cryptozoo isn’t just populated with gorgeous, fantastical beasts and imaginative hybrid humans, it’s got people at the heart of its story, people with good intentions who will debate the merits of displaying these mythical creatures versus helping them to remain hidden and unknown.

This animated film for adults takes on the complexities of utopian visions and explores them in a very spirited and penetrating manner, with a visual style that is vibrant and unusual. A strong voice cast including Jason Schwartzman, Michael Cera, Grace Zabriskie, Peter Stomare, Zoe Kazan, Louisa Krause, and Angeliki Papoulia, breathe life into an epic fantasy world that starts with sex and unicorns and ends in a place much more wondrous. If you yourself are strange and unusual, Cryptozoo is not to be missed.

Sundance 2021: Censor

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Her name is Enid, and she’s a film censor, the person who negotiates the bad language, graphic violence, drug use, and nudity of a film, deciding just how much can be kept in and retain an R rating, and which films will either need to be edited, or bumped up to NC-17 and so on. “I’ve salvaged the tug of war with the intestines. Kept in most of the screwdriver stuff. And I’ve only trimmed the tiniest bit off the end of the genitals, but some things should be left to the imagination.” I love her already.

Enid’s (Niamh Algar) profession is under scrutiny at the moment as a salacious murder is dominating headlines, apparently inspired by a face-eating scene in a movie that she and her partner signed off on. Censor is set in the early 80s, but our culture still hasn’t grown tired of blaming violent movies, music, and video games for all that ails us, and the uproar doesn’t feel dated at all.

One day, while screening yet another nasty from an unending pile, a scene feels eerily familiar. Enid’s little sister disappeared years ago, and as the only witness, Enid’s never been able to provide much detail. But this – ? This scene rings a distant bell, unearthing disturbing memories that haunt Enid well past the film’s end credits. It seems incredible, and her parents’ skepticism is dismissive, but Enid becomes obsessed with linking her sister’s fate to this old film. When she learns the director is filming a sequel, she stalks production, hoping to be reunited with her abducted sister. But the closer she gets, the more we blur the lines between fact and fiction.

Director Prano Bailey-Bond dissolves reality with such subtlety that we hardly notice the point of no return. When, exactly, did Enid cross the line, and is there any going back? This is a send-up to vintage horror that fans of the genre will recognize and appreciate. Algar gives a fulsome performances, worthy of not just a final girl but an actual, flesh and bones character with guilt and grief, guts and glory. Censor is bold and stylish, and once it goes meta, it gains a confidence that is hard to deny.

Sundance 2021: Human Factors

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It starts with a home invasion. Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo) have taken their family to their vacation home in a coastal town where the trouble awaits. Jan is outside on the phone when he hears a scream. When no second scream is forthcoming, he resumes his call, unaware that his wife has just encountered people in the house, who flee before anyone else spots them. Rattled, Jan and Nina share their bed with their two children that night, a young son named Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) and teenage daughter Emma (Jule Hermann), their restful weekend getaway already shattered.

Forging on with the weekend in an attempt to put the incident behind them, it would seem their shaky nerves aren’t the only thing troubling this suburban family. Everything is off-balance. Jan hates that Nina has called her brother, who swoops in to the rescue. Nina hates that Jan has made a huge decision at their mutually owned and run business by himself. Jan suspects the break-in is a product of Nina’s nervous imagination, since she’s the only witness. And son Max accuses his father of “hiding” during the incident. Seeds of doubt and mistrust have been sown this weekend, and soon these weeds are growing out of control through the cracks of their family’s core. This has been a triggering event that challenges our notion of truth and of perspective. There is no one narrative, only shifting lenses that reveal the fragility of familial bonds.

Though I admire writer-director Ronny Trocker’s film thematically, I found the viewing experience to be less than ideal. Not because it’s brutally tense, though it is. And not because the characters aren’t particularly likeable, though that’s true too. The incident in question, whether or not it happened, was fairly trivial, and of no real consequences. Yet this relatively small stone thrown into the family puddle creates unexpected ripples whose effects are long-lasting. It’s really just a trigger point to expose already-existing fault lines, and then we sit back and watch this family quake. My problem with the film is that it was simply a boring watch. I wasn’t compelled by this characters, and didn’t much care about the aftershocks or the outcome for this family. Human Factors means well but asks for too much patience in exchange for too little pay out.

Palmer

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Fresh out of prison after serving only 12 years of his sentence, Palmer (Justin Timberlake) rolls up at his grandma’s house with nowhere else to go. Grandma Vivian (June Squibb) is the one who raised him after his mom split and his dad died and she’s there for him again when he needs her.

He’s not the only one she pinch-hits for. Shelly (Juno Temple) next door is often… indisposed. By drugs and an abusive boyfriend. Which is already a pity, but Shelly’s also got a young son named Sam, who comes to stay with Vivian whenever his mother disappears, which is often. Life at Vivian’s is the only real stability Sam (Ryder Allen) has ever known. He eats regularly and sleeps in a real bed and gets to class on time. And now Palmer is a bonus father figure, something Sam has been craving.

Palmer is a convicted felon who’s lucky to find work as a janitor and Sam is a little boy who likes to play princesses. You wouldn’t have guessed that they were each exactly what the other needed but they do form a friendship, one that empowers Sam and gives Palmer’s life meaning.

Is Palmer cute and kind of sentimental? Yes it is. You’ll feel you’ve seen this kind of thing before because you have. Such is the redemption drama. And yet admittedly the performances are compelling, and the kid is charming as hell. Justin Timberlake shows some surprising range leading a strong ensemble cast. Palmer sees himself in this young abandoned boy, and his charity toward him is an opportunity to absolve some of his past sins. Together they are building a life, and yes it’s trite but it’s also very watchable.

Sundance 2021: How It Ends

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Do you want to know how it ends? A meteor. That’s how we go. For the people of Earth, that day is today. It’s the last day of Earth, and Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) has been invited to a party. The meteor is the least interesting thing about How It Ends, and its only certainty.

Liza’s initial inclination is to spend her last day alone, getting high and eating cookies. It’s a pretty solid plan, but unfortunately her Younger Self (also named Liza of course) (Cailee Spaeny) vetoes. Plan B involves checking off items on a list of regrets en route to the pre-apocalypse party. On Liza’s list of regrets: exes, former friends, estranged parents. Truth is the theme for the day, and if that doesn’t keep her honest, her Younger Self sure will. Liza and Young Liza hoof it across Los Angeles, encountering a pretty eclectic cast of characters, but most of all bonding with and taking care of each other.

How It Ends is oddly playful for the pre-apocalypse, but as both co-writer-director and its star, Zoe Lister-Jones certainly has the right sort of presence to pull it off. She’s got excellent chemistry with Spaeny, which you’d really sort of have to, or the whole thing would be an utter failure. It’s a fascinating philosophical experiment, to have two versions of the same person interacting with each other so naturally. I loved the relationship between the two, and felt a little jealous of it. I enjoyed laughing with them, eavesdropping on their most intimate conversations, and indulging in a double dose of Lister-Jones’ unique brand of charm.

Frequent collaborators Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein manage to take a quirky premise and ground it with self-aware performances. As the meteor draws ever nearer, we dread it not because of the impending doom of humanity, because it means the movie itself will end, and we’ve been having too much fun to want to say goodbye.

Sundance 2021: One For The Road

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Aood (Ice Natara) finds out he’s dying of cancer and knows just who to call: everyone! Working his way through his contact list, he calls every friend and acquaintance to thank them for whatever it was that they’d shared. At the end he’s got only a select few remaining, close friends that he must say goodbye to in person.

His first call is to estranged best friend Boss (Tor Thanapob), a club owner in New York City, who agrees to return to Thailand to help his friend with a last request. Aood has a couple of ex-girlfriends to return mementos of their past relationship to, though closure is what he’s really after, on their behalf more than his own, being quite familiar with the dull ache of being the one left behind. One girlfriend is happier to see him than another, but either way, names are getting ticked off the list, dwindling contacts deleted from his phone. You might start to wonder, as I did, with half the movie still to go, is Aood’s cancer linger just a little too long? Alas, there is one relationship left to repair: predictably, that of Aood and Boss, and an ex they more or less have in common.

At this point the film jogs backwards, illuminating their shared history, but derailing the narrative of the first film quite drastically. Surprisingly, it eventually finds its way back, but I’m not convinced this was the best path to telling the story. More than just a story, though, One For The Road is a toast to male friendship and complicated bonds between young men.

Although the film didn’t blow me away, it did have some truly stand-out moments, and even if a bit derivative, it’s clear director Baz Poonpiriya has a voice and style he’s just beginning to own. If One For the Road is manipulative, at least it’s skillfully manipulative, and delivered via some fine performances. Poonpiriya shows promise, with some room for improvement.

Sundance 2021: Flee

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Amin is a successful academic on the verge of doing the whole house and marriage thing, but he’s been hiding a secret for more than 20 years, and a secret with roots that deep can threaten even the most stable life. So for the first time, Amin sits down to share his story with an old friend.

Amin and writer-director Jonas Poher Rasmussen have known each other since high school, when Amin arrived in Denmark from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor alone in the world, having fled the country of his birth by himself. His back story was shadowy and thus often the subject of gossip, but Amin kept his story to himself, and only now, in this animated documentary, is he choosing to unravel it for the first time, an attempt to reconcile himself with the past, perhaps, and an act of hope toward his future.

A powerful testament to the refugee experience, this animated documentary is unbound from the usual confines of story-telling and benefits from a multi-layered approach to truth and identity. Amin’s story is complicated, and it is sometimes contradictory. He’s had to hide the truth for fear of persecution, for fear of discovery, but he’s also hidden it from himself, a common coping mechanism. Thus his story is not just one man’s account of fleeing the Taliban, but an exploration of trauma and its far-reaching ramifications. And for dessert, an accidental treatise on unreliable narrators, truth distorted by perception and time. Even the animation itself serves as a filter, obscuring us further from a subject whom we never properly meet.

Shame and guilt are the salt and pepper to Amin’s narrative, seasoning wounds that are already festering quite nicely without help. We can only hope that the process has been cathartic for Amin, and grateful for the intimacy and trust implicit in this act of sharing. Rasmussen’s familiarity and friendship with his subject is a gift and a curse. Certainly his gentle coaxing elicits a fuller story that we might otherwise have heard, but Rasmussen sometimes forgets we don’t know Amin as well as he does. We might have enjoyed an introduction. And Rasmussen’s wish to grant his friend a happy ending is admirable, but as a film maker, it’s a little easy, a little pat. And yet, over the course of our 83 minutes together, we want the best for him too. Amin doesn’t owe us his story. His sharing is a gift, and if Rasmussen is tempted to wrap it up in a bow, who can blame him?

Executive produced by Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Flee premiered on opening night at the Sundance Film Festival and was so well-received that NEON snapped it up, the first acquisition of Sundance 2021, before I could even post this review.